Mr. Eliot and the St. Louis Blues by MARSHALL McLUHAN By permission of The Herbert Marshall McLuhan Foundation 122 St. Ninian St., Antigonish, NS. CANADA B2G 1Y9 (902)863-5230 Fx: (902)867-5153 Any reproduction of this document, in whole or in part must include the aboce permission statement, and the copyright statement at the end of the article. When I lived in St. Louis in the late thirties, I was interested in occasionally catching sight of trucks bearing the label "The Prufrock Brick Company." This could have been an echo in my mind engendered by the relation of Eliot's father to "The Hydraulic Press Brick Company." However, I did not then know that Eliot's father had been so employed. Is it possible that Eliot was putting on some actual people in Prufrock and Other Observations? I would also like to draw attention to some remarks on St. Louis which appear in To Criticize the Critic (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1965). An address delivered by Eliot at Washington University in St. Louis on dune 9, 1953, appears in this volume under the title "American Literature and the American Language," in which he states: . . . I am very well satisfied with having been born in St. Louis: in fact I think I was fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. (p. 45) What I am going to mention about Eliot in St. Louis goes very deep into the structure of the English language, and relates directly to the St. Louis Blues. Eliot had said a great deal about jazz and blues, both in his prose and in his poetry, and he was vividly aware that the rhythms of spoken English, preserved in the oral tradition of the South, were immediately present in the structure of jazz. For many reasons which need not be cited here, both jazz and rock are forms of music which have made English a world language, since these forms cannot be sung except in English. They are so compelling that people around the world are eager to sing them in English. Further, the peculiar character of jazz derives from the South, perhaps because of the interplay between industrial and metropolitan life, on one hand, and agrarian life, on the other hand. People situated on the frontiers between metropolitan and agrarian culture are naturally inclined to interplay them. The sounds of the city can be poured through the spoken idiom in such areas. The oral tradition of the South retains much Elizabethan form, as does that of Ireland. One thing that musicologists have not been very explicit about is the human need to put the sounds of the environment through the vital social process of dialogue in order to humanize the merely mechanical sounds of the environment. As a poet, Mr. Eliot was exceedingly aware of the role of the poet in "up-dating" the speech vehicle that it may serve the humanizing needs of its time. Eliot, in fact, has something to say about this matter in the speech already quoted above. Eliot was acutely aware of the strategic location of St. Louis, culturally and psychologically speaking, mentioning its . . .utmost outskirts of which touched on Forest Park terminus of the Olive Street streetcars, and to me, as a child, the beginning of the Wild West . . . (p. 44) The city of St. Louis, with its origin via the French fur traders who opened up the entire North American continent, is a meeting point of East and West and South by virtue of its two great rivers, the Missouri and the Mississippi. In the speech quoted, Eliot remarks on the universality of the Mississippi: . . .Yet the Salem of Hawthorne remains a town with a particular tradition, which could not be anywhere but where it is; whereas the Mississippi of Mark Twain is not only the river known to those who voyage on it or live beside it, but the universal river of human life -- more universal, indeed, than the Congo of Joseph Conrad. For Twain's readers anywhere, the Mississippi is the river. There is in Twain, I think, a great unconscious depth, which gives to Huckleberry Finn this symbolic value: a symbolism all the more powerful for being uncalculated and unconscious. (p. 54) The strong local flavour combined with unconscious universality is what Eliot perceived as the significance of St. Louis in his own life and work. In giving him access to a world in which jazz and blues were formed, Eliot saw his own role as the updater of the English language in our time. Up-dating is a process which only the greatest figures can perform, and this role Eliot considered to have been performed by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn: . . . Twain, at least in Huckleberry Finn, reveals himself to be one of those writers, of whom there are not a great many in any literature, who have discovered a new way of writing, valid not only for themselves but for others. I should place him, in this respect, even with Dryden and Swift, as one of those rare writers who have brought their language up to date, and in so doing, 'purified the dialect of the tribe.' (p. 54) As a man from St. Louis, Eliot regarded New England as relatively local compared to St. Louis and the Mark Twain territory which it includes. The "up-dating" process which Eliot notes having been performed by Dryden and Swift, on one hand, and Mark Twain, on the other, is to be understood as a figure-ground interplay. Dryden and Swift, in the age of Newton, strip- ped the rhetorical flowers from English, bringing it into relation to math- ematics and astronomy. Mark Twain, in the age of the telegraph, retrieved the full tribal dialect of group speech, the stripping away of the facade of written respectability and polish in favour of the audile-tactile involve- ment which came to fruition in jazz. All this and much more about St. Louis and its crucial role can be found in Eliot's prose and poetry. Obviously, he regarded it, and intended his readers to regard it, as "no mean city." In a preface Eliot wrote to Edgar Ansel Mowrer's THIS AMERICAN WORLD (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928) he wrote of his own background: . . .The family guarded jealously its connections with New England; but it was not until years of maturity that I perceived that I myself had always been a New Englander in the South West, and a South Westerner in New England.... In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shellfish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite, and the blue sea of Massachusetts. (p. 28) The reader of The Dry Salvages will be especially interested in this comment: . . .And I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not. Of course my people were Northerners and New Englanders, and of course I have spent many years out of America altogether; but Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world. (p. 29) The river, for Eliot, was clearly a direct link between the North and the South, between St. Louis and New Orleans, between the fur traders, and the Kings of Cotton." It is a subject that an imaginative researcher could develop into a major study. (Copyright: McLuhan Associates Ltd., 1974. Marshall McLuhan. July 17, 1974)